Welcome to I Am Your Target Demographic. Today we’re covering the basics of something called Roblox. This is intended for people who don’t know what this is, so if you play or you’re a fan of Roblox, this might be a handy video to share with friends or family that could use some help understanding it.
Imagine Roblox is a platform, for many different types of games and experiences. If you were interested, you could actually create games in this platform for anyone to play. Most people might just be consumers as opposed to creators, finding their favorite games to spend time with.
There is a way to spend and earn real life money here, so some games or items within games might cost money, paying those creators who made it. Roblox also puts a high emphasis on your avatar, the character that appears in the game world as you. You can earn items and customization but you can also spend currency to buy them.
The currency in this game is called Robux and is purchased from real life money. If someone else is playing Roblox but it’s your account or your credit card attached, make sure you’ve looked into settings to make sure they’re not racking up charges buying all the craziest outfits. Now let’s address that question… Is Roblox for kids?
That might be your first assumption, mostly due to the art style, but think of this more like Legos, something that even adults can have fun with, especially on the game creation side. Roblox has spent a lot of time evolving their security and privacy settings, so there are certain games off-limits to anyone under 13 for example. There are also strict chat controls, so if you’re a parent, you can control who can (or if anyone can) chat with your child.
Let’s look at some examples of what types of games people can play. What we’re seeing now is an example of a game called Jailbreak. There’s a prisoner team and a police team.
The prisoners are trying to evade the guards and escape the prison, while the police are trying to beat the prisoners to certain places and stop those criminals from getting out. There’s a whole wide world outside the prison, so even if someone escapes, there are vehicles such as drones and cars and you’re ultimately still trying to evade the police. Another popular game right now is called Adopt Me.
You can have pets that you’re responsible for and have to feed, which you hatch from eggs that you have to purchase. You can also trade, so you might find that you want to trade for better items to eventually get better eggs or even better pets. You’re doing these trades with other real people, so it teaches you negotiation skills and even courtesy skills, how to foster good relationships with other people.
Now, as I was researching Roblox, there was an incredible amount of information out there about scams, so I’d be negligent if I didn’t talk about the concerns. In Adopt Me for example, you trade a lot, and you might even trade items that you paid for with real life money and there’s a lot of ways that someone can trick you or take advantage of you to get these items. You also might not have a lot of Robux to spend, so scammers love to try to get you to click on sketchy links with the promise of free Robux.
Be incredibly wary of any links or websites promoting free Robux, it’s usually too good to be true. Parents, make sure your kids know to not click any links as well. Why are we talking about Roblox now, when it came out in 2006?
When the COVID-19 virus struck the world, Roblox became an incredible way for kids to interact and play with each other, so it saw a massive surge in users, with over 164 million monthly active users. In the United States, it’s estimated that 3 out of 4 children between 9-12 are playing Roblox. With that surge, it means game creators are also making much more.
Some creators have made close to half a million dollars, enough to hire entire teams of developers to create and upkeep these games. So hopefully you found this superficial overview helpful to get a grasp on what this is. Thanks for watching!
